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47417.454056
When Democritus said that the atoms are in contact with each other, he did not mean contact, strictly speaking, which occurs when the surfaces of the things in contact fit on [epharmazousōn] one another, but the condition in which the atoms are near one another and not far apart is what he called contact. …
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48376.454187
Let’s say you like ? more than ?, ? more than ?, and ? more than ?. Then your likes form a loop. But is it wise to have such a loop of likes? An old way to show that it is not wise is to show that, if you have a loop of likes, then you are prey to a wealth pump — that is, a scheme where you pay for what you know you could keep for free. The old wealth pump goes like this: Let’s say you start with?. Then a man asks you if you want to trade ? for ?. Since you like ? more than ?, you make this trade. Then the man asks if you want to trade? for ?. Since you like ? more than?, you make this trade too. And then the man asks if you want to pay a small sum to trade ? for ?. Since you like ? more than ?, you pay the small sum and make the trade from ? to ?. Now, you are back to ?, but you have less wealth: You paid for what you knew you could have kept for free, which does not seem wise.
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171325.454205
There is a profound lack of respect, tolerance, and empathy in contemporary politics. Within the past few decades, political opponents have steadily grown to dislike, distrust, fear, and loathe each other; moreover, members of polarized groups perceive one another as closed minded, arrogant, and immoral.1 However, new empirical research suggests that intellectual humility may be useful in bridging political divisions.2 For this reason, a growing number of psychologists and philosophers maintain that intellectual humility is an antidote to some of democracy’s ills.
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402104.454215
As was recently shown, non-relativistic quantum theory can be derived by means of a projection method from a continuum of classical solutions for (massive) particles. In this paper, we show that Maxwell’s equations in empty space can be derived using the same method. In this case, the starting point is a continuum of solutions of equations of motion for massless particles describing the structure of Galilean space-time. As a result of the projection, the space-time structure itself is changed by the appearance of a new fundamental constant c with the dimension of a velocity. This maximum velocity c, derived here for massless particles, is analogous to the accuracy limit h¯ derived earlier for massive particles. The projection method can thus be interpreted as a generalized quantization. We suspect that all fundamental fields can be traced back to continuous sets of particle trajectories, and that in this sense, the particle concept is more fundamental than the field concept.
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402124.454225
In 2015 the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (‘LIGO’), comprising observatories in Hanford, WA and Livingston, LA, detected gravitational waves for the first time. In the “discovery” paper the LIGO-Virgo Collaboration describe this event, “GW150914”, as the first “direct detection” of gravitational waves and the first “direct observation” of a binary black hole merger (Abbott et al. 2016, 061102–1). Prima facie, these are somewhat puzzling claims. First, there is something counter-intuitive about describing such a sophisticated experiment as a “direct” detection, insofar as this suggests that the procedure was simple or straightforward. Even strong gravitational waves produce only a tiny change in the length of the 4km interferometer arms.
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402145.454234
Most proposals on the problem of mental causation or the exclusion problem emerge from two metaphysical camps: physicalism and dualism. However, a recent theory called “Russellian Panpsychism” (PRM) offers a distinct perspective on the relationship between consciousness and the physical world. PRM posits that phenomenal consciousness is fundamental and pervasive. It suggests that consciousness and physical properties are not entirely separate but rather intertwined. Phenomenal consciousness serves as a foundational ground for the dispositional nature of physical properties. By doing so, PRM proposes a novel solution to the exclusion problem, combining elements from both physicalism and dualism while addressing their inherent difficulties. Nonetheless, the success of PRM faces challenges, as argued by Howell (2015). In this paper, I argue that if PRM is formulated as a version of dual-aspect monism, it can offer a distinctive approach to tackling the exclusion problem.
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540215.454243
Buddhism was introduced to the Korean Peninsula from China during the
Korean Three Kingdoms period. It first arrived in Koguryŏ, a
kingdom on the northern end of the peninsula, in 372 CE and then in
Paekche, a kingdom on the southwest of the peninsula, in 384 CE. It
arrived in Shilla, a kingdom on the southeast of the peninsula, in 521
CE by way of Koguryŏ. The influence of Chinese Buddhism on Korean
Buddhism cannot be treated lightly because Korea imported mostly
sinologized Buddhism, not Indian Buddhism. However, Korea added its
own color and historical and social context. Throughout history, Buddhism has significantly influenced the
worldview of the Korean people, instilling concepts such as karma and
the interconnectedness of all things.
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550130.454251
One of the central aims of James Buchanan’s long and fruitful career was to identify constitutional rules that could contain rent seeking. A central task for constitutional theorists is to identify constitutional rules that prohibit or limit rent seeking, in order to ensure that a society’s economic system benefits all and preserves their liberty. However, there is a related, but equally dangerous phenomenon that Buchanan does not explicitly address as a variant of rent seeking: the attempt by sectarian groups to capture governmental apparatus to impose their values on others. The goal of these ideologues is not economic gain, but evaluative gain. Co-opting state power, they force those with different values to share or at least submit to their own sectarian vision of the good society. Like rent seeking, this activity tends to undermine the gains from trade in a market order. These activities give the sectarian an unequal gain in utility and may impose a utility loss on others. In this broad sense, sectarian ideologues collect a rent. If we can specify the sense in which ideologues collect a rent, we can expand the reach of Buchanan’s research program. Towards this end, I develop an account of what I shall call ideological rent seeking and the ideological rent seeker. I then extend Buchanan’s approach to constitutional choice to cover the mitigation of ideological rents. The best constitutional rules are those that constrain a weighted sum of economic and ideological rent seeking.
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552587.454262
Matthew Leisinger (2020) argues that previous interpretations of John Locke’s account of akrasia (or weakness of will) are mistaken and offers a new interpretation in their place. In this essay, we aim to recapitulate part of this debate, defend a previously articulated interpretation by responding to Leisinger’s criticisms of it, and explain why Leisinger’s own interpretation faces textual and philosophical problems that are serious enough to disqualify it as an accurate reconstruction of Locke’s views. In so doing, we aim to shed further light on Locke’s views on the various ways in which humans are prone to err in their pursuit of happiness.
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552635.45427
This article summarizes John Locke’s considered views on freedom, explaining that freedom is a power of the mind to act in accordance with its volitions, that freedom is a power that can belong only to substances, that we have the freedom to will in many cases, including the power to hold our wills undetermined and thereby suspend the prosecution of our desires. This is a seemingly reasonable account of how our minds work, and should work, when we make (important) decisions. But Locke takes us to be morally responsible and accountable, not just for suspending when it is appropriate, but also for spending our time wisely during suspension, in the proper investigation of what would most conduce to our happiness. The problem is that we are prone to motivated irrationality during suspension when deciding what to investigate and for how long to do so. And thus we need to stop and consider whether we are succumbing to such irrationality before making the ultimate decision. This, I argue, leads to an infinite regress and forces Locke into an unsurmountable dilemma.
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565175.45428
The concept of white ignorance refers to phenomena of not-knowing that are produced by and reinforce systems of white supremacist domination and exploitation. I distinguish two varieties of white ignorance, belief-based white ignorance and practice-based white ignorance. Belief-based white ignorance consists in an information deficit about systems of racist oppression. Practice-based white ignorance consists in unresponsiveness to the political agency of persons and groups subject to racist oppression. Drawing on the antebellum political thought of Black abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, I contend that an antiracist politics that conceives of its epistemic task in terms of combating practice-based white ignorance offers a more promising frame for liberatory struggle. A focus on practice-based white ignorance calls for a distinctive form of humility that involves recognition of the limits of one ’s own political agency in relation to others, which is integral to democratic relations between free, equal, yet mutually dependent persons.
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622858.454291
In republican political philosophy, citizenship is a status that is constituted by one’s participation in the public life of the polity. In its traditional formulation, republican citizenship is an exclusionary and hierarchical way of defining a polity’s membership, because the domain of activity that qualifies as participating in the polity’s public life is highly restricted. I argue that Black American abolitionist Frederick Douglass advances a radically inclusive conception of republican citizenship by articulating a deeply capacious account of what it means to participate in the public life of the polity. On Douglass’s conception of republican citizenship, what it means to contribute to the polity, and thereby be a citizen, is to act in ways that contest and shape what the polity values. We contest and shape what the polity values not only through public discourse traditionally conceived or grand political acts like revolt, but also through quotidian forms of social interaction. In his pre-American Civil War political thought, Douglass deployed his radically inclusive account of republican citizenship as the conceptual foundation of his stance that enslaved and nominally free Black Americans were already, in the 1850s, American citizens whom the polity ought to acknowledge as such. The everyday resistance in which enslaved Black Americans engaged—their plantation politics—is, for Douglass, a paradigmatic type of citizenship-constituting activity, because it involves modes of collaboration and confrontation that enact a recognition of mutual vulnerability and embody the assertion that one matters. Douglass’s conception of republican citizenship offers a normative framework for emancipatory struggles that strive to secure meaningful membership for the marginalized through the transformation of unjust polities.
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632869.454302
In this paper we present novel conceptions of identity arising in and motivated by a recently emerged branch of mathematical logic, namely, Homotopy Type theory (HoTT). We consider an established 2013 version of HoTT as well as its more recent generalised version called Directed HoTT or Directed Type theory (DTT), which at the time of writing remains a work in progress. In HoTT, and in particular in DTT, identity is not just a relation but a mathematical structure which admits for an interpretation in terms of Homotopy theory (directed Homotopy theory in the case of DTT), which in its turn is supported by common intuitions concerning identity of material objects through time, change and locomotion. The DDT-based conception of identity presented in the paper is non-symmetric: here identity is “directed” or has a “sense”. We compare the HoTT-based conceptions of identity with standard theories of identity based on the Classical Predicate calculus, and show how the HoTT-based identity helps to treat traditional logical and philosophical problems related to identity and time. In the concluding part of the paper we explore some ontological implications of the HoTT-based identity and show how HoTT and DTT can serve for designing formal process ontologies. The paper is self-contained and comprises expositions and informal explanations of all relevant philosophical, logical and mathematical contents.
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632896.454311
In 2016 Vladimir Voevodsky sent the author an email message where he explained his conception of mathematical structure using a historical example borrowed from the Commentary to the First Book of Euclid’s Elements by Proclus; this message was followed by a short exchange where Vladimir clarified his conception of structure. In this Chapter Voevodsky’s historical example is explained in detail, and the relevance of Voevodsky’s conception of mathematical structure in Homotopy Type theory is shown. The Chapter also discusses some related historical and philosophical issues risen by Vladimir Voevodsky in the same email exchange. This includes a comparison of Voevodsky’s conception of mathematical structure and other conceptions of structure found in the current literature. The concluding part of this Chapter includes relevant fragments of the email exchange between Vladimir Voevodsky and the author.
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665515.454319
D espite F. A. Hayek s apparent rejection of the very idea of social justice, this essay develops a theory of social justice from entirely Hayekian components. Hayek recognizes two concepts of social justice—local and holistic. Local social justice identifies principles that can be used to judge the justice of certain specific economic outcomes. Hayek rejects this conception of social justice on the grounds that specific economic outcomes are not created by moral agents, such that social justice judgments are a category mistake, like the idea of a “moral stone” (Hayek 1978, 78). But if one understands social justice as the principles that ought to govern the social order as a whole, as John Rawls ([1971] 1999) did, then Hayek is on board. Hayek agrees with Rawls that we cannot use contractarian principles to evaluate particular economic outcomes, and he supports Rawls’s attempt to identify the general principles that should govern social systems (Hayek 1978, 100).
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665592.454327
Catholic integralism claims that governments must secure the earthly and heavenly common good. God authorizes two powers to do so. The state governs in matters temporal, the Catholic Church in matters spiritual. Since the church has the nobler end of salvation, it may direct the state to help enforce church law. The integralist adopts two seemingly conflicting norms of justice: (a) coercion into the faith is always unjust, but (b) coercion to keep the faith is just. But if religious coercion is wrong at the start of the Christian life, why is it permitted after that? The integralist answer is baptism. Baptism serves as a normative transformer: it transforms religious coercion from unjust to just. My thesis is that baptism fails as a normative transformer. I critique Thomas Aquinas’ approach to this question and then adapt gratitude, associative, and natural duty theories of political obligation to repair his argument. These strategies fail.
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723335.454336
by a factor of at least sixteen. She also presents a positive thesis, namely that the Great Fact occurred when Western societies began toascribe dignityand liberty tothe bourgeoisie by changing their rhetoric. I argue that McCloskey’s positive thesis can benefit from an illuminating moral psychological distinction between what Peter Strawson has called “social morality” and “individual ideal” or what I shall refer to as moral rules and personal ideals or aspirations. McCloskey’s positive thesis can be mapped onto these two categories and thus separated into two distinct theses: the Imperatival Thesis and the Aspirational Thesis. The former holds that societies that stopped blaming and ostracizing the bourgeoisie for their characteristic activities were the first to develop, whereas the latter holds that societies stopped ostracizing the bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie started innovating because they took on new aspirations and ideals. These twin theses help to explain how the ideas of dignity and rhetoric operate in Bourgeois Dignity.
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723478.454346
This essay defends Catholic integralism. Integralists propose that governments exist to secure the common good: temporal and spiritual. God authorizes two powers to govern humankind: the state governs in matters temporal, the church in matters spiritual. When their missions intersect, the church is sovereign owing to its nobler purpose. Christian states must make their authority available to the church to secure religious ends. Despite rejecting integralism, most Catholic political philosophers are perfectionist: states exist to promote the authentic individual and common good. These natural law perfectionists agree that states exist to promote natural goods: goods, such as health and friendship, that anyone can see as such through the use of reason. Yet in contrast with integralism, they deny that states should promote supernatural goods: goods, such as faith and hope, that we only grasp through revelation. Most Catholic perfectionists treat natural and supernatural goods asymmetrically. Integralists reject the asymmetry. God authorizes the church to promote supernatural goods, and the church may direct the state to advance its mission. On this basis, I argue that integralists can mount a powerful philosophical argument against standard natural law perfectionism—the symmetry argument. It claims that natural law perfectionists cannot justify their asymmetric treatment of goodness. Integralism, in contrast, treats the good symmetrically.
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748229.45436
In a previous paper, we have shown that an ontology of quantum mechanics in terms of states and events with internal phenomenal aspects, that is, a form of panprotopsychism, is well suited to explaining the phenomenal aspects of consciousness. We have proved there that the palette and grain combination problems of panpsychism and panprotopsychism arise from implicit hypotheses based on classical physics about supervenience that are inappropriate at the quantum level, where an exponential number of emergent properties and states arise. In this article, we address what is probably the first and most important combination problem of panpsychism: the subject-summing problem originally posed by William James. We begin by identifying the physical counterparts of the subjects of experience within the quantum panprotopsychic approach presented in that article. To achieve this, we turn to the notion of subject of experience inspired by the idea of prehension proposed by Whitehead and show that this notion can be adapted to the quantum ontology of objects and events. Due to the indeterminacy of quantum mechanics and its causal openness, this ontology also seems to be suitable for the analysis of the remaining aspects of the structure combination problem, which shows how the structuration of consciousness could have evolved from primitive animals to humans. The analysis imposes conditions on possible implementations of quantum cognition mechanisms in the brain and suggests new problems and strategies to address them. In particular, with regard to the structuring of experiences in animals with different degrees of evolutionary development.
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748290.454368
Although fundamental arguments have been presented to support the value-laden nature of all scientific research, they appear to be difficult to apply to at least some cases of basic research in physics. I explain why this is the case. I argue that basic research in physics is, in a very specific sense, often value-laden to a lesser degree. To spell this out, I refer to the different signal-to-noise ratios that can be achieved in different fields of research. I also argue that having a very low degree of value-ladenness in the very specific sense that I identify does not mean that the research in question is not value-laden at all.
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781218.454377
In The Order of Public Reason, Gerald Gaus uses Hayekian insights to give a contractarian justification for the specific social rules the rules that comprise the social order of a free people. But in doing so, Gaus inadvertently endorses a kind of skepticism about our ability to justify the institutions that comprise our social order as a whole. The disadvantage of a political theory so pervasively skeptical is that, while contractors can arrive at a series of specific solutions to their social problems, they have no way to assure themselves that their moral nature and their moral practices as a whole are sufficiently sound that the rules they endorse are genuinely morally binding. I argue that this problem can be solved in political practice through the adoption of a civil religion. Civil religions provide narratives and social practices that assure members of free orders that their regimes are good or justified on the whole. In this way, we can introduce the idea of civil religion into contractarian political theory as a social technology for sustaining a free social order.
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781403.454387
Democratic theorists have proposed a number of competing justifications for democratic order, but no theory has achieved a consensus. While expecting consensus may be unrealistic, I nonetheless contend that we can make progress in justifying democratic order by applying competing democratic theories to different stages of the democratic process. In particular, I argue that the selection of political officials should be governed in accord with aggregative democracy. This process should prize widespread participation, political equality, and proper preference aggregation. I then argue that the selection of public policies by political officials should be governed in accord with deliberative democracy. This process should prize high quality deliberation and political equality. A process democracy is a democracy that joins an aggregative process for selecting officials with a deliberative process for selecting policies. Democracy is justified and legitimate when it is structured in this way.
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781421.454395
Political philosophers are overwhelmingly liberal: freedom and equality are the fundamental political values. Yet, in much of the world, people adopt religious anti-liberalisms. States must bring people into harmony with the cosmic moral order, not protect their autonomy. In this essay, I argue against Catholic integralism, the most intellectually sophisticated and long-standing Christian anti-liberalism. Most people believe that we should treat peoples of all race, nationalities, and creeds as equals. But Catholic integralism treats people unequally according to their creed because it coercively privileges one creed above all others—its own. So integralism treats its citizens unfairly.
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805964.454404
In Canada medical assistance in dying (MAiD) excludes individuals who have a mental health disorder as their sole underlying medical condition (MD-SUMC). This suggests mental illness is conceptually distinct from somatic illness, a position that requires further analysis. The Canadian government has postponed legislation on mental health conditions since it is highly controversial compared to physical illness, and this will allow them to collect more data on the issue (Government of Canada 2024a). Aside from the legislative reality in Canada, Jeffrey Kirby (2022) has described three positions that scholars have taken up regrading the ethical permissibility of MAiD for MD-SUMC: (a) accept that MAiD for MD-SUMC is ethically permissible; (b) presently oppose MAiD for MD-SUMC, but maintain that MAiD for MD-SUMC could become ethically permissible should the current eligibility criteria better align with the relevant empirical data; and (c) oppose MAiD for MD-SUMC on “philosophical grounds” and maintain that no alteration could make the practice ethically permissible.
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830100.454413
What Is It Like to Be a (Rawlsian) Liberal? Some Comments on Alexandre Lefebvre’s Liberalism as a Way of Life
Liberalism is today mostly understood as a political doctrine that is essentially about how constitution and law should be designed to regulate the exercise of state power and to guarantee that institutions meet some fairness criteria. …
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852584.454421
Number Nativism is the view that humans innately represent precise natural numbers. Despite a long and venerable history, it is often considered hopelessly out of touch with the empirical record. I argue that this is a mistake. After clarifying Number Nativism and distancing it from related conjectures, I distinguish three arguments which have been seen to refute the view. I argue that, while popular, two of these arguments miss the mark, and fail to place pressure on Number Nativism. Meanwhile, a third argument is best construed as a challenge: rather than refuting Number Nativism, it challenges its proponents to provide positive evidence for their thesis and show that this can be squared with apparent counterevidence. In response, I introduce psycholinguistic work on The Tolerance Principle (not yet considered in this context), propose that it is hard to make sense of without positing precise and innate representations of natural numbers, and argue that there is no obvious reason why these innate representations couldn’t serve as a basis for mature numeric conception.
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921280.454431
In General Relativity, reference frames must be distinguished from coordinates. The former represent physical systems interacting with the gravitational system, aside from possible approximations, while the latter are mathematical artefacts. We propose a novel three-fold distinction between Idealised Reference Frames, Dynamical Reference Frames and Real Reference Frames. This paper not only clarifies the physical significance of reference frames, but also sheds light on the similarities between idealised reference frames and coordinates. It also analyses the salience of reference frames to define local gauge-invariant observables and to propose a physical interpretation to diffeomorphism gauge symmetry.
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1036637.454439
The problem this paper addresses is that scientists have to take normatively charged decisions which can have a significant impact on individual members of the public or the public as a whole. And yet mechanisms to exercise democratic control over them are often absent. Given the normative nature of these choices, this is often perceived to be at odds with basic democratic principles. I show that this problem applies in similar ways to civil service institutions and draw on political philosophy literature on the civil service (e.g.
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1069927.454447
Christian political theologians have usually taken one of two approaches to the purpose of political order: agonist or perfectionist. Either political order should seek a civic peace between opposing forces or advance the full human good. Both approaches face difficulties, so I propose a middle-way: Christian reconciliationism. This political theology holds that political order should seek reconciliation between diverse moral perspectives. With perfectionism, reconciliationism aims to establish the political order as a moral order, but with agonism, reconciliationism rejects attempts to use the political order to promote the full human good. It thereby avoids the vices of both approaches.
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1069956.454457
OUR aim in this article is to argue that the public reason project, as initiated by John Rawls and others 25 years ago, is evolving into two distinct projects, with one having clear advantages over the other. The public reason literature is no longer an intramural debate between people with similar foundational commitments, but two new projects with fundamentally different goals and starting assumptions. These two projects derive from the resolution of a tension within Rawls’s thought, specifically the conflict between what Rawls called pro tanto justification and full justification. Pro tanto justification concerns the justification of a political conception of justice that “takes into account only political values,” such that the justification of a political conception is “complete” in that political values can be “suitably ordered, or balanced, so that those values alone give a reasonable answer by public reason to all or nearly all questions concerning constitutional essentials and basic justification.” But its very name suggests the possibility that pro tanto justification might be overridden by citizens’ comprehensive doctrines. Full justification follows, occurring when each citizen “accepts a political conception and fills out its justification by embedding it in some way into the citizen’s comprehensive doctrine as either true or reasonable.” That is, each citizen must figure out how to order or weigh political values against her nonpolitical values. A political conception itself “gives no guidance in such questions” because it does not address nonpolitical values.